Campos Racing have become the early surprise package of the 2024 Formula 2 season, leading the teams’ championship by nine points after the first five rounds. Recently, Feeder Series caught up with the team principal, Adrián Campos Jr.

By Martin Lloyd

Campos Racing have started the year surprisingly strongly, picking up five podiums in the first ten races, including two feature-race victories for Isack Hadjar. As the series approaches its sixth round at Barcelona, Campos leads the teams’ championship by nine points. 

In light of this impressive start, Adrian Campos told Feeder Series at Portimão, where he was overseeing Campos’ Eurocup-3 and Spanish F4 teams, where his that he felt pleased with his pair of Red Bull Junior Team drivers.

“We knew that we had a good lineup. The talent of Pepe [Martí], when he gets the experience, the results will arrive again. And the experience and the talent of Isack, he’s proving that now. We are just giving them the tools to shine, and I think they are doing it. I am very happy with the line-up we have, and we are proving that when we have a strong line-up, the team does a good job.”

Martí has not scored since Jeddah, but the Spaniard has shown flashes of his potential in the early stages of his rookie season, including two podiums on debut in Bahrain.

Meanwhile, Hadjar’s upturn in form is particularly impressive. The Frenchman struggled in 2023, finishing with just one podium to his name, having finished third in the sprint at the Red Bull Ring. This resulted in a final position of 14th place in the drivers’ standings, a disappointing result for a driver who showed significant promise in F4, FRECA and F3. This year, Hadjar looks to be back at his best, and Campos attributes that to the familial environment of the team, founded by the late Adrián Campos Sr in 1998.

“I think Isack was missing a little bit of [the family environment] in this sport. We try to maximise the performance of the drivers by giving them the trust they need, making them feel good, and allowing them to work with people they can trust 100%, and showing the driver that we trust him.

“Then they only need to drive as quickly as possible and focus on these things. This, I think, is key for them to deliver because they are young kids trying to show their talent in a very difficult world.”

Promise, then disappointment in Monaco

The Campos team are thriving in this environment. Already, the F2 outfit has scored more points than in the entirety of 2023, when they finished with a total of 99. Their current score of 105 could have been even higher, but Hadjar lost a near-certain win at Monaco when the timing of a virtual safety car helped Zak O’Sullivan take his first F2 victory.

Hadjar was understandably frustrated afterwards.

“Honestly, after a few laps, I had the race in the bag,” he said. “With two laps to go, I was already in my mind so happy. Until this happened at the end. We lost P1 in a way that I would never expect, I didn’t see it coming.”

O’Sullivan entered the pits at the perfect time – pit stops are not allowed under virtual safety car conditions in F2, and the intervention was called seconds after the ART driver had entered the pit lane. This meant his stop was legal, and he would save valuable seconds compared to the rest of the field, taking the lead of the race with a handful of kilometres remaining.

Hadjar was distraught, having lost the opportunity to take his third feature race win in succession, but Campos felt that the situation could not have been easily anticipated.

“I mean, at the end, I can understand that he got so mad because of the information he had at that moment,” Campos said. “But from our perspective, we saw what the real situation was for us. We were covering for a safety car, but a virtual safety car was so unlikely to happen.

“The virtual safety car came just at the moment that the leading driver was entering the pits. The options were so low that we were not even considering it.”

Hadjar ‘would have been leading the championship’

By losing the race win, Hadjar lost seven points. Had he taken those seven points, he would have led the drivers’ standings as the series moved onto Barcelona, but he currently sits in second place, two points behind Hitech’s Paul Aron.

The Monaco feature race was not Campos’ first experience of misfortune in 2024. Campos feels that the team could have been even more successful without these and other incidents, such as Hadjar’s double retirement in Saudi Arabia due to mechanical issues.

“If we look at the season, if we didn’t have the bad luck that we had in some races, like the two races of Saudi and getting hit by Bortoleto in the first corner of Bahrain when he was going to fight for the win. If we didn’t have all this bad luck, for sure he would have been already leading the championship.”  

In addition to these incidents, Hadjar was also involved in a large accident at the start of the Imola sprint race that took out five cars. Despite these difficulties, the Frenchman is in a strong position as the series intensifies during the European summer. He could become the first Campos driver to finish in the top 10 of the F2 championship since Jack Aitken took fifth in 2019.

Indeed, Campos now feels that his team is ready to compete for championships, feeling that they could claim their first title in the second tier since winning the GP2 teams’ championship in 2008.

“There is nothing that makes us think we cannot win the championship,“ he said. “The season is very long, we don’t know what will happen, but at this moment I think Isack is the driver to beat, and he’s showing that every weekend.”

Additional reporting by Jim Kimberley

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency